Building the 433Mhz Helical antenna for telemetry using the 3D Robotics radio modems and the Ardupilot (Arduloon) from DIY Drones and the Mission Planner as ground control for the Ardusat mission.An article about the antenna: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs ... al-antennaTeam Prometheus will be streaming the launch LIVE! To the internet at: http://www.livestream.com/teamprometheusLive video of the launch, mission control and live streaming video from the payload. Live telemetry including Spectrometer, giger counter, H2 sensor and much more! Launch scheduled for September 22nd 2012.

The team welcomes Jeroen Cappaert and Joel Spark of Nanosatisfi to the "Rocket Ranch" in Lampasas, Texas for the launch Jeroen arriving from Belgium and Joel from Germany Jeroen arrived yesterday Joel arriving today.

Our helium bottle was empty- I guess the valve leaked and we had no way to get anymore on short notice due to the helium shortage! I had no idea it was that bad! We had another bottle in Dallas when it was checked it was also empty. We tried to get Hydrogen it was Friday the brakes on the truck where out we tried to get them fixed to run to Burnet, Tx to get the only bottle of H2 we could find (250 cft) we didn't make it before closing. Everyone gave up then Larry in Fort Worth offered his bottle of He but by then it was just too late. Right now Stew and I are pulling out the old Hydrogen making apparatus we designed a couple of years ago and are going to make the plans available for everyone. We will not be using helium again as many years ago I said it was a nonrenewable resource and it turned out to be a fact. NSE-14 will be rescheduled. Perhaps I should have not skipped 13

Your Military have just bought 3 helium airships from a company over here i wonder if that has anything to do with a short term shortage i hope its not long term as there is a lot of medical stuff reliant on He a it it would be nice if Cern could confirm if the Higgs Boson is real or not.

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

Alex Yeah, it is long term. The government sold off the reserves it had to keep from spending money on the storage facility (a huge cavern that held 1 Billion cubic meters) And now there is going to be a shortage and a price hike in the long term. I just found out about all this I bought our last bottle in April and the shortage started in May. I tried to tell everyone a long time ago we needed to use Hydrogen and now it's going to be a have too. The shortage is now because all of the reserve is gone. Now we are using what is produced in the making of LPG and that's it. There aint no more than that.

This is the second attempt at the UAV drop. Here is the first attempt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRDoaRfM ... e=youtu.be We may go on Monday now. This is the APM2.5 going on this launch. Because 3D Robotics sponsors us we are working on Ardurocket code with the prototype 32 bit OS. That code will include cold gas thrusters. Still just work work work. I am working on a machine to cut gore patterns for the zero pressure balloons we will be switching too. I'm making a few by hand right now for testing. It's slow but steady. I expect it will kick up as spring approaches. We are trying to do at least one launch a month. We have switched to hydrogen gas. NSE-14 was done in collaboration with Robotrising and we got some awesome panoramas at altitude over Texas like this http://www.360cities.net/image/spectacu ... ,0.00,70.0 I'm working on a new liquid byprop engine too. So yeah I've been plenty busy.